How did Diego, a male breeding turtle, save his species from extinction on the Island of Hispanola? Ever wondered why weasels do a "war dance?"
These and other questions I had never thought of are answered by YouTube and TikTok star mndiaye_97, Mamadou Ndiaye, with deep knowledge in short segments and a genuine interest in communicating the answers to the audience that did not know they needed to see this information. But that is one of the central epistemological points of the interweb. We didn't think we needed to know and didn't realize that we needed to think.
These accessible and uncannily funny segments kept me scrolling, accumulating all this minutia knowledge about the animal world and the creativity of a human mind that has recognized a good algorithm. This will help me win the next trivia event I never attend. And yes, yes, yes, there are some hella remarkable and fascinating animals with dashing personalities and memorable quirks, temperaments, habits, and dispositions.
You can learn all that you didn't know you wanted to know about monkeys, takins, sharks, elephants, echidnas, aye-ayes, octopuses, feral camels, and creatures you may have never heard of at Ndiaye's "Casual Geographic" YouTube channel. You will find longer videos about themes like "How a Camel's Bad Habit Can Put You in a Coffin" or "The Experiment that Broke a Dolphin's Heart."
Note: some postings are violent and irreverent. You know, when animals don't go wild but simply be animals around humans that assume…cuddle, and end up scratched, broken, and indignant. Or when we over-anthropomorphize the animal world. Yes, there may be an (in)appropriate threshold – that mndiaye_97 tests.
